The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht

7. The Flourish of Retirement, 1993–2004

 S E V E N The Flourish of Retirement 1993–2004 More than two thousand letters and postcards of Hecht’s date from 1993 to 2004—more than half, that is, of all the extant correspondence that has come down to us, and surely enough to make for a fine volume of its own. One doesn’t have to search far for explanations. Apart from the acquisition of a fax machine in the mid-1990s, which allowed for preserving a copy of the letter, once Hecht had concluded celebrating what he called “my manumission and deliverance from the bonds of the academic profession”in May 1993, he was free to devote his energies to those intellectual activities that always mattered the most to him: “writing and the reading that is the groundwork of my writing,” as he wrote to his son Evan in 2002. Hecht’s writing was to include not just the voluminous correspondence that marked the long, rich close of his career. He also published two new volumes of poetry, Flight Among the Tombs (1996) and The Darkness and the Light (2001), an introduction to the Cambridge edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1996), and a substantial collection of critical essays, Melodies Unheard (2003). Even letters written in the final months of his life, although necessarily fewer in number, brim with prospects, in spite of his being recently diagnosed with lymphoma: “In fact, I had been taking notes for an 249 250 The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht essay I would like to write,” he told Eleanor Cook in a letter of August 10, 2004. “It will be called De Gustibus, and will concern how deeply personal, quirky and often irrational, are our judgments of taste, about which we are sometimes very defensive, and about which we sometimes feel vulnerable, residing as these judgments do in some highly private inwardness, deeply severed from what we normally think of as our faculty of judgment.” Hecht did not live to write the essay, but the eighty-one-year-old poet’s strong expression of intent makes clear the intellectual vigor of his later years and his undiminished engagement in the world of ideas. The letters from this period show both an ever-widening field of correspondents and, in a few select instances, a return to the fold. Some thirty years after their initial act of collaboration on The Seven Deadly Sins, Hecht reunited with the graphic artist Leonard Baskin on two new collections of verse. The first of these ventures involved the elaborate twenty-two-poem sequence, “The Presumptions of Death,” with death personified under various guises in the poems and the accompanying woodcuts. Initially published in an elaborate Gehenna Press limited edition, the sequence then became part of Hecht’s trade book collection entitled Flight Among the Tombs. This project was followed by The Gehenna Florilegium (1998), an elegantly designed book which, like “Presumptions,” was published in an expensive limited edition. The general reader will discover the sixteen “flower” poems Hecht composed for this occasion scattered throughout his last two books of poems. So, too, a number of poems on biblical themes in The Darkness and the Light were to be part of a shared effort between poet and artist, but Baskin’s death in 2000 prevented this project from reaching fruition. With regard to continuing and new correspondents, Hecht’s greater leisure allowed further time for exchanging letters with both William Maxwell and Eleanor Cook. In the latter case, the two were especially drawn to riddles and enigmas. (Cook’s Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens, published in 2007 by Princeton, bears the dedication,“in memory of Anthony Hecht.”) A friendship with Daniel Albright, a polymathic professor at Harvard, sparked by a mutual interest in Auden, also developed into an illuminating series of letters on Herbert and Hardy and “The Presumptions of Death” sequence. And in Garry Wills, the prolific cultural historian, Hecht discovered yet another epistolary companion. Following Hecht’s response to Papal Sin in 2000, the exchange would grow with each new book published by Wills. During this period Hecht was also brought into contact with Hayàt Nieves Mathews, a Bacon scholar (with an unusual pedigree) residing in Italy, in The Flourish of Retirement, 1993–2004 251 response to a fan letter he received from her in 1997; and the two exchanged more than thirty letters on a variety of literary subjects. He also...